Gun Control

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Is there no limit to the lethal and authoritarian absurdity of America, land of mass gun massacres like Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland, and now El Paso and Dayton among other pockmarked sites?

America’s horrendous gun violence can be attributed to many factors, but there is one factor that is hardly talked about or explored in public discourse – the apparent link between mass shootings and the rampant culture of US militarism.

In the USA, right-wing groups such as the National Rifle Association interpret the Second Amendment of the US Constitution as permitting any individual to own weapons. In this week’s episode of On Contact, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortriz, in her new book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, and in her conversation with Chris Hedges, argues the amendment has more to do with white supremacy and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples, African-Americans and immigrants than the individual right to have a gun.

Since October 2017, America experienced three of the deadliest mass shootings in modern history. This epidemic coincides with a frightening resurgence of white nationalism. Sometimes the two trends overlap.

Boston teacher Nino Brown, of the ANSWER Coalition, speaks with TRNN’s Ben Norton about the links between US militarism, gun violence, and police brutality. He connects the epidemic of school shootings domestically to the endless wars internationally.

Co-hosts Tyrel Ventura and Tabetha Wallace venture down under to Australia to interview a number of experts, including Pulitzer Prize winner John Pilger, on gun violence, gun culture, and the differences between gun ownership in the US and Australia.

With the US mass shootings epidemic claiming 17 more lives at a school in Florida, there has been a nationwide outcry against multi-million-dollar lobbying by the National Rifle Association. But how the NRA, and other corporate giants, wield power and influence over the US government is mostly concealed by the very laws meant to strengthen democracy.

The American high school dropout is an unconscious revolutionary. Instead of casting aspersions upon the dropout, we should attempt to decode this behavior that is condemned by parents, school authorities, educational experts, religious leaders, politicians, and peers. To understand the distress of the American high school student requires us to examine the politics of quitting school. Leaving school is a political act. Its political causes cannot be investigated in a context of isolating and blaming the individual.

Our country’s rocked by yet another mass shooting this time in Newtown, Connecticut. This time a 20-year-old kid, Adam Lanza shot and killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, in their home then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School where he killed six adults including the principal and 20 children before killing himself.

McMaster university, Hamilton, Ontario January 15 2012.
Chris Hedges speaks to a full room of people at the Gandhi lecture on non violence. He clearly states that American gun culture is rooted in white supremacy and a fear of black people. Then states that the American founding fathers where enthusiastic about committing genocide.

The shooter of Congresswoman Giffords acted as a domestic suicide terrorist on the political “battleground” of American politics. His YouTube postings and “goodbye” phone messages are ominously reminiscent of the traditional farewell videos of Islamist martyrs.

The deadly combination of suicide terrorists’ mental instability, their political and religious indoctrination, and readily available bomb materials and firearms explode in violence almost every day somewhere in the Middle-East.

As some of my readers know, I am a public health physician. I recently had the opportunity to offer some remarks at a conference at the Yale School of Public Health on gun violence and public health. This Commentary is drawn from those remarks. I began by noting that when talking about this subject, the National Rifle Association is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. I noted at that conference that none of the other speakers, all of whom had government grant-funded research and intervention programs underway, mentioned the words “National Rifle Association.” All publicly funded, how could they? If one whiff, not of the gunshots that are so frequent in our society, but of criticism of the NRA coming from a publicly funded program got back to the NRA, giving its totally corrupting influence on the political process in our country, there goes that funding.

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